EXCLUSIVE: Read it here first...

Terrence Howard Hustles to Save a Life!

Tue., Aug. 28, 2007 4:36 PM PDT by Marc Malkin

Courtesy Los Angeles Magazine

Literally!

While interviewing Howard over lunch at the Four Seasons Hotel for Los Angeles magazine, writer Margot Dougherty began choking on a piece of sushi. “He wraps his arms around me from behind, makes a fist at my solar plexus and gives two quick tugs,” Dougherty writes about the moment Howard possibly saved her life. “Bingo. I am breathing.”

Howard said that was the first time he ever performed the Heimlich maneuver. “I saw it on Mrs. Doubtfire,” he told Dougherty. “She saved Pierce Brosnan.”

Dougherty wasn’t the only one, um, opening up during their chitchat.

Howard, 38, got frank about sex. He admits to requesting that adult channels be blocked in his hotel rooms before he checks in. “We have our weaknesses,” Howard said. “The porn industry is an $11 billion industry. Don’t feed off my natural desire toward curiosity and sensuality if it’s leading in the wrong direction—which it has done.”

It seems like that curiosity also got in the way of religion. Howard said he was just 16 when he began studying with Jehovah's Witnesses. But he stopped short of conversion because they forbid sex outside marriage. “That’s where I had my troubles,” said Howard, who can now be seen in The Hunting Party opposite Richard Gere and The Brave One with Jodie Foster. “I’m still working hard at that one. I’ll be a Witness one day, as soon as I can discipline myself in that area.”